Sartor Resartus

Sartor Resartus

Teufelsdröckh in Monmouth Street, illustration to Sartor Resartus by Edmund Joseph Sullivan.
Author	Thomas Carlyle
Country	Great Britain
Language	English
Genre	Comic Novel, Sui generis
Publisher	Fraser's Magazine
Publication date	1833-1834

Sartor Resartus (meaning 'The tailor re-tailored') is an 1836 novel by Thomas Carlyle, first published as a serial in 1833–34 in Fraser's Magazine. The novel purports to be a commentary on the thought and early life of a German philosopher called Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (which translates as 'god-born devil-dung'), author of a tome entitled "Clothes: Their Origin and Influence", but was actually a poioumenon ("product"). Teufelsdröckh's Transcendentalist musings are mulled over by a sceptical English Reviewer (referred to as Editor) who also provides fragmentary biographical material on the philosopher. The work is, in part, a parody of Hegel, and of German Idealism more generally. However, Teufelsdröckh is also a literary device with which Carlyle can express difficult truths.

Archibald MacMechan surmised that the novel's invention had three literary sources. The first being The Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift, whom Carlyle intensely admired in his college years, even going by the nicknames "Jonathan" and "The Dean". In that work, the three main traditions of Western Christianity are represented by a father bestowing his three children with clothes they may never alter, but proceed to do so according to fashion. The second being Carlyle's work translating Goethe, particularly Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Faust, all of which are quoted and explicitly referred to, especially in Teufelsdröckh's crisis being named "The Sorrows of Young Teufelsdröckh". The third being Tristram Shandy from which Carlyle quotes many phrases, and he referred to earlier in his letters.

Carlyle worked on an earlier novel, Wotton Reinfred which Macmechan refers to as "The first draft of Sartor". Carlyle finished seven chapters of the semi-autobiographical novel depicting a young man of deeply religious upbringing being scorned in love, and thereafter wandering. He eventually finds at least philosophical consolation in a mysterious stranger named Maurice Herbert who invites Wotton into his home and frequently discusses with him speculative philosophy. At this point the novel abruptly shifts to highly philosophical dialogue revolving mostly around Kant. Though the unfinished novel deeply impressed Carlyle's wife Jane, Carlyle never published it and its existence was forgotten until long after Carlyle's death. Macmechan suggests that the novel provoked Carlyle's frustration and scorn due to his "zeal for truth and his hatred for fiction" spoken of in his letters of the time. Numerous parts of Wotton appear in the biographical section of Sartor Resartus, in which Carlyle humorously sentences them to the bags containing Teufelsdröckh's autobiographical sketches, which the editor constantly complains about being overly fragmented or derivative of Goethe. Though widely and erroneously reported as having been burned by Carlyle, the unfinished novel is still extant in draft form, several passages being moved verbatim to Sartor Resartus but with their context radically changed.